Subruralbia

This was an actual series of signs on some farmland near my house over the course of a year or so. Probably only amusing to me.



I mean, everyone's gotta make a buck, right?

Fuck you, Katy Perry

This was me (and by me I mean me in my wild imagination) being totally awesome and sexy in the car today:



This is what the guy next to me at the stoplight saw:

The Three Funniest Things in the World. To Me.

There are three things in this world that will always make me laugh when brought to mind. Okay, so they're not actual THINGS, they're more like events that have happened in my life. And (with deepest yet insincere apologies to him) all of them involve my little brother.

I guess I'll do this in chronological order. If you don't find these hilarious, I don't blame you. They're probably not as funny as they are in my brain.

Number One
The first event happened when my brother was maybe 4 years old. In the evenings as my mom would be trying to get us to settle down and go to bed, my brother and I would, as most children do, be at our hyperest (is that a word? I'm probably supposed to say "most hyper").

Often we would jump and play on our parents' bed, it being a king-size monstrosity of blankets, pillows, and bounciness.


On this particular night we were playing a game where he would roll around the covers and I would try to catch him and tickle him to death until he screamed. Although the screaming didn't usually stop the tickle torture.


You know how sheets and blankets are tucked into the end of the bed, between mattress and box spring? So my brother was rolling around trying to avoid the tickle fingers of death when his little 4-year old self tumbled off the end of the bed... and got stuck in the tucked in sheets.


Oh how I laughed at him struggling to get out.


And laughed.


For a few minutes he thought it was funny until it became apparent I wasn't going to help him out because I was rolling on the bed, tears streaming down my face, barely able to breathe.

My mom, alerted by the sounds of one child yelling for help and the other having an hysterical fit, rushed into the room to see what was causing the before-bed ruckus.


I was immediately ordered to my room as my mom helped my brother out from the ensnaring sheets... where I continued to laugh for the next half hour until I nearly vomited.


Number Two
This one occurred maybe one year later, when my brother was 5 and I was just starting to hit puberty. I had secretly bought myself a razor because I was pretty sure my mother would be against me shaving my legs and armpits. She generally looks down on women altering their bodies in any way to fit into social norms or please that other gender.


My brother was taking a bath one evening and I was diligently doing homework in my bedroom (which means I was either on the phone with my best friend or flipping through my recent issue of BOP) when I heard my mom cry out from the bathroom, which was right next to my room. A second later she was yelling my name.


I sprang up and ran out the door, fearing something terrible had happened.

I tore around the corner into the bathroom, and was greeted by this:


MY BROTHER HAD TRIED SHAVING HIS FACE WITH MY RAZOR!

I couldn't handle it.


As my angry mother shook the razor in my face, demanding to know 1. why I was shaving my legs and, 2. why on EARTH I would leave it where my little brother could reach it, all I could do was shake my head, bite my lip, and giggle violently.


My brother was okay, he had just cut his lip. But to this day, that image of him with a soap beard, holding my razor, and looking confused with blood running down his chin can still send me into giggle fits.

You think I'm a terrible person, don't you?


Number Three
Now this, this is the prize of the collection, in my opinion.

One April Fool's Day, when my brother was maybe 7 or 8 and I was a bored teenager always looking for new entertainment, I decided to booby trap the house. I started out when I got home from school with the usual salt in the sugar bowl and honey on door knobs, but then I recalled a certain trick a friend had told me about that day:


It was genius.

I set it all up, knowing my brother would be home from school soon, throw his backpack in his room, and run to the bathroom. I couldn't wait.

The minutes seemed to tick by sloooooowly as I waited by the livingroom window, waiting for his bus to bring him home.


Finally, it showed up. I was bursting with excitement, this was going to be EPIC.

As I predicted, my brother ran inside, slammed the door, yelled that he was home, ran up the stairs, threw his backpack in his room, and ran down the hall into the bathroom and closed the door behind him.


I stood at the end of the hall, holding my breath. And then:



OH MY GOD, I literally exploded with laughter! It was better than I had imagined! I was on the ground, tears streaming down my face, convulsing with fits of giggles as my mother rushed up the stairs to see what the commotion was about this time.


Of course I was in BIG TROUBLE. I had to apologize to Richie and then clean up the mess in the bathroom. I continued to laugh to myself as I mopped and scrubbed.


You ask, was it worth it? Yes. A hundred times yes, it was worth it!

This is Sophie

She wished for a blog with a cartoon of herself on it. Well this isn't her blog, but here's a cartoon picture of her!


Specifically, this is Sophie in Mexico, she had a week-long love affair with coconuts there.

I've had lots of fun adventures with Sophie over the years, I'm sure she will re-appear in more posts! Like maybe one about rollerbladers in Amsterdam.

So, what is a convergence zone?

Several of my friends have asked me this after I forced them to read the few entries on my blog and tell me whether or not they were totally lame or slightly entertaining.

Well let me tell you!!

A convergence zone is a phenomenon that happens when two distinct flows of air and such meet at a certain point and make crazy weather happen.

I happen to live in the Puget Sound Convergence Zone, which is an area from the coasts of about to Edmonds to Everett that flows east towards Monroe. This happens from the upper air flows coming in off the Pacific Ocean, splitting around the Olympic Mountains, and then converging again over Puget Sound. Which means that this small region I live in is often rainier, snowier, muggier, stormier, windier, lightningier... than the rest of western Washington. ISN'T THAT SUPER INTERESTING?

Here's a picture. Because I like to draw. Even if I kind of suck at it.

WoW Post #1

I feel quite certain that occasionally I will make posts about WoW. I apologize. But I had to share this, I'm totally geeking out over the recent wow-heroes ranking of holy priests on my server.

(click on the picture to see it full size, I don't know why it makes them all tiny)

How Mexico Almost Killed Me, or The Clumsiest Girl in the World.

I'm really tired of my fingers peeling and being painful and just generally gross. They look like this:


Maybe I should explain how this happened. I get hurt all the time, in very stupid ways. It's been this way since I was a small child, my mom used to call me Bompy-Lou, since I was always "bomping" into things.

This particular injury (along with several othes) I acquired in Mexico, two weeks ago, on a dream vacation with my friends on the Yucatan Peninsula.

Actually, let me go back to 5 days before we left.

It started out as a warm, muggy Monday, at least what we'd call warm and muggy in the Pacific Northwest. My mom and I were working at a nearby customer, doing our usual pulling weeds and planting native plants.



After a while it was time to prune a bizarre looking plum tree. This particular tree had thorns roughly two inches long and almost as thick as a pencil at the bottom, but as they were few and far between we worked around them diligently, throwing the unwanted branches onto the ground nearby.

When we were done we left the branches where they were to be picked up when we finished. At one point I had to walk by them, and I stepped on the small, unassuming branches, thinking my garden clogs with inch-thick rubber souls would protect me.

I was wrong.



I don't usually cry from pain, but I cried like a baby then. As the thorn had penetrated the rubber soul of my clog and then deep into my foot, my mom had to pull it out with the strength required to uncork a wine bottle when you have no corkscrew and you desperately need a drink NOW. Worst. Pain. Ever.


So anyway, there I was several days before a long-awaited vacation, with a nasty puncture wound in my foot that made it almost impossible to walk. Fortunately, I (for once in my life) had a stroke of good sense and went to see a doctor about my injury the next day. She prescribed me antibiotics to fight off the growing infection. Unfortunately, the bottle had this label on it:

Well fuck that, I thought, I'm going to Mexico and I'm going to be in the sun and I'm going to have the greatest fucking time of my life. So I bought 80 proof sunscreen. (I just realized this really has nothing to do with progressing the story because I didn't get sunburned or discolored as it threatened I might. But I thought you'd want to know.)

Several days went by, several awful days. My foot steadily got better, but I was having Boy Drama. Yes I still have Boy Drama. When do they become men? I haven't figured that out yet. So this was me in the days leading up to the trip:


Well finally the big day came, all nine of us managed to make it to Cancun without much trouble, we rented our cars, bought lots of rice, beans, and vodka at the local Wal-Mart, and made it to our magical paradise dream vacation home of awesomeness near Tulum.


This post is getting out of hand. BUT I'M NOT EVEN CLOSE TO BEING DONE!!!

By the second night in Mexico my Boy Drama still hadn't been resolved so I spent several hours like this again:

Which eventually led to this:

Which led to:


They say you should never mix alcohol and swimming because, you know, you might pass out and drown or something. For me the danger was grabbing excitedly onto the sharp bottom of one of the tiled in-pool bar stools while flailing about trying to make a speedy getaway in a quick game of Marco Polo.


At least I remembered to pack band-aids. But not very many.

Later, after five years of fun had been packed into three days, we found ourselves exploring a local nature reserve. This consisted of driving our tiny rental cars down a crazy bumpy pot hole-y road in the middle of the Mexican jungle.


We pulled over near a bridge where some locals were fishing and found a primitive parking spot with a trail heading into the jungly brush, which we hoped went in the direction of a beach. Lucky us, it did! The trail took us along the edge of a sand bank that was maybe four feet above the beach. Most of us were careful to stay several feet away from the edge, but I got distracted by an eagle in a tree...

(I was having trouble drawing a sand bank so here's an actual picture of the incident.)

So that's how I sprained my ankle in Mexico. I managed to buy an ace bandage at the pharmacy that evening, along with some new band-aids for the disgusting, festering wounds on my fingers.

The next day we went to visit the Mayan ruins of Coba. I walked all over the ruins with my ace-bandaged ankle and even climbed a goddamn pyramid and made it back down safely.


But after I was safely back on the ground:


Sigh.

Oh, and the Mexican band-aids I bought gave me a rash. A bad one. Which blistered, all over my wounds. Which is how I ended up with my current affliction.

My first entry!

This is me and my family:

Yes that's me in the pink dress with the crazy hair. My little brother Richie is next, he's 20, smart, and my complete opposite in every way. Except maybe sense of humor. Then there's my mom. She worries a lot and spends most of her time outside in the garden. My step-dad is last. He bikes everywhere and spends the rest of his time locked in his office on his computer.

So I'm 20...something... and currently living at home with these people. I like to say currently because it makes it sounds less permanent, like I have some big plan to move out next month and get a full-time job in my dream career and be a real adult forever and ever.

I haven't always lived at home though. For the first part of my 20s I went to school and lived with various roommates in Bellingham, WA. Probably a large part of me has been shaped by that time spent in Bellingham with all my wonderful friends there, and I hope to move back someday... I hope that's on the sooner side rather than the later side.